History

Quoting Russ Bellant’s Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and U.S. Cold War Politics, pages xvii–xviii:

It’s May 17, 1985: President Reagan has been back in the nation’s capital less than two weeks from his much-criticized trip to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany. Now, floodlights and television cameras that are part of a President’s entourage are waiting at the Shoreham Hotel, as are 400 luncheon guests.

Ronald Reagan had recently characterized the Nazi Waffen SS as "victims." It seemed a rewrite of the history of World War II rather than a recommitment to its painful lessons. Reagan’s comments held special meaning for some of his afternoon luncheon guests. Although it was a Republican Party affair, it was not the usual GOP set, but a special ethnic outreach unit, the National Republican Heritage Groups (Nationalities) Council (NRHG{N}C). The Republican Heritage Groups Council is an umbrella for various ethnic Republican clubs and operates under the auspices of the Republican National Committee.

If President Reagan needed a boost after the Bitburg fiasco, this was the crowd to supply it. To the assembled media, Reagan’s visit that afternoon appeared as a routine stop, perhaps paying a re-election debt. The Republican Heritage Groups Council did, in fact, help elect Reagan. And they gave him a long standing ovation that afternoon at the Shoreham. To some of those attending the 1985 Council meeting, Reagan’s rehabilitation of the Waffen SS must have offered a sense of personal and historic vindication.

The Republican Heritage Groups Council has a special type of outreach. It appears to have consciously recruited some of its members—and some of its leaders—from an Eastern European émigré network which includes anti­-Semites, racists, authoritarians, and fascists, including sympathizers and collaborators of [the] Third Reich, former [Axis personnel], and even possible war criminals. The persons in this network represent only a radical right fraction of the ethnic communities [that] they claim to represent.

These antidemocratic and racialist components of the Republican Heritage Groups Council use anticommunist sentiments as a cover for their views while they operate as a de facto émigré fascist network within the Republican Party. Some of these less savory antidemocratic personalities were part of the 1987 Republican Heritage Groups Council meeting as well as that 1985 luncheon audience; and some would later join the 1988 election campaign of George [H.W.] Bush.

Ronald Reagan said that it wasn’t what it looked like when he saluted those dead Axis soldiers, but as I am about to show you, we have plenty of reasons to suspect that he was lying about that, such as how he endorsed the so‐called ‘Captive Nations’, which was littered with neofascists and antisemites:

[I]n 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his successful presidential campaign at a Labor Day “ethnic festival” at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. According to Jersey City’s Ukrainian Weekly newspaper, “The majority of the more than 20 ethnic groups taking part in the festival were affiliated with the Captive Nations Committee of New York.” Ivan Dochev died in 2005, but on paper he remains an honorary president of the Captive Nations Committee of New York, which the AF–ABN established in the 1950s.

With a friend of the “captive nations” finally in the White House, the 25th annual Captive Nations Week was dedicated to the fake 40th anniversary of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, and ABN leader Yaroslav Stetsko got an invitation to Washington where he shook hands with President Reagan and Vice President Bush. According to Old Nazis, New Right, and the Republican Party by Russ Bellant, the BNF-affiliated VOC trustee, Radi Slavoff, arranged Ivan Dochev’s 1984 visit to the White House as executive director of the Republican Heritage Groups Council, the GOP’s “special ethnic outreach unit.”

There was possibly some significant overlap between the Republican Heritage Groups Council and the now defunct World Anti-Communist League, of which Ronald Reagan was undeniably a member:

Members of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) — a right wing international cartel of sorts — include[d] such luminaries as Ferdinand Marcos, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and Adolfo Calero, commander in chief of the armed forces of the FDN contras. The WACL’s roots [went] back to 1954 with the establishment of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League. [In the 1980s,] the WACL [grew] to six regional organizations with affiliates in more than 90 countries.

One of the most important people in the WACL [was] retired U.S. Major General John Singlaub. Singlaub began his military and intelligence career as an OSS member during World War II. In 1976, he became Chief of Staff of both the United Nations and U.S. Army Forces in South Korea. He was removed in 1977 after he publicly criticized President Jimmy Carter’s withdrawal of troops from Korea.

Singlaub joined WACL in 1980 and formed an American chapter called the United States Council for World Freedom. Singlaub was elected president. Singlaub [gave] the WACL credibility in several ways:

• President Reagan began calling the contras “freedom fighters” in 1983, a term the WACL and others on the far right have used for years.

• When U.S. Congress temporarily cut off Nicaraguan contra funding in 1984, a group of various American conservative leaders raised $25 million in private “contributions.” Singlaub and the WACL were at the center of the campaign.

• Several WACL members [had] been appointed as ambassadors to the Bahamas, Costa Rica, and Guatemala by Reagan.

Then, at the 17th Annual WACL Conference, held in San Diego, California, Singlaub read a letter which said in part, “The World Anti-Communist League has long played a leadership role in drawing attention to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day. Nancy and I send our best wishes for every future success.” The letter was signed by Ronald Reagan.

The WACL [was] so extreme — according to Scott and Jon Lee Anderson who wrote INSIDE THE LEAGUE, an exposé of the WACL — that the John Birch Society […] shunned it and advise[d] its members to do likewise.

Geoffry Stewart-Smith, a staunch British anti-communist, left the WACL because it is “largely a collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international […] the very existence of this organization is a total disgrace to the free world.”

Reagan knew what he meant when he said that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought on the ‘wrong side’ in the Spanish Civil War. While he might have been demented as early as the 1980s, it is absurdly unlikely that anybody would willingly associate with these types all by mistake.

Aside from these and a former HJ member whom he very briefly employed before firing for unrelated reasons, some of Reagan’s other associates included

J. Peter Grace — A scion of the Grace fortunes, he [was] head of Reagan’s commission to study domestic economic cuts.[56] For 30 years his company employed Otto Ambrose, [an Axis] war criminal from the German drug cartel I.G. Farben. Ambrose, a chemist, developed “Zyklon B,” the actual gas used in the chambers to kill the Jews and others deemed “inferior.”[57] The German steel group, Flick, which has extensive [Axis] ties in the past and whose scandals [were] rocking German politics [in the 1980s], hold a controlling stock interest in the Grace company.[58]

The Grace family is intimately involved with the formation of the anti-Communist American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD).[59] AIFLD played a key rôle in the Kissinger plan to overthrow Allende in Chile, and insert the ruling [para]fascist Pinochet.[60] After the coup, which involved American Green Berets,[61] Kissinger sent a Mr. Rauff from the State Department to advise the newly formed Chilean secret police (DINA). Rauff had been in charge of the “mobile ovens” used to kill [Roma] and Jews, homosexuals and political dissidents in Eastern Europe for the [Third Reich].[62] These same forces were later involved in the assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.[63]

Helene von Damm — Personal White House appointment secretary long-time personal secretary to Ronald Reagan, she stands to be appointed Ambassador to Vienna, and controls all cabinet level appointments in the Reagan administration.[64] She came to the United States in the 1950s in the company of Albrecht Otto von Bolschwing, and worked for him as a translator.[65] Von Bolschwing gave the direct orders to Adolph Eichmann in the dread[ed] Eisenstatz, group, the SS killers.[66] Helene’s husband, Christian von Damm, ran the Bank of America in La Paz, Bolivia, which defaulted on a huge U.S. loan.[67]

The Reagan régime had no interest in pursuing Axis war criminals. Quoting Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door: How America became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, chapter 12:

Ignored for decades, [Axis officials] in America had suddenly become a political flash point by the time Ronald Reagan was in the White House, with anger fomenting on all sides. The vigilantes leaving bombs on the doorsteps of ex-Nazis were only part of the firestorm.

Many conservative Cold Warriors were furious, too, but for very different reasons. While the Jewish militants were angry that the American justice system hadn’t gone far enough to track down ex-Nazis, the conservatives were upset that it had gone too far, playing right into the hands of the Communists, they charged. Inside the gates of the White House, the conservative critics found a fierce ally in President Reagan’s own firebrand advisor, Pat Buchanan.

Buchanan, a former Nixon aide with a rapier tongue and a pugnacious personality, didn’t mask his disdain for what he called the “revenge-obsessed” and “hairy-chested Nazi hunters” at the Justice Department. He believed that the entire Nazi-hunting team should be abolished, and from his prominent perch in Washington—as a top aide to Reagan at the White House, in his nationally syndicated newspaper columns, and in his frequent cable-TV appearances—he launched what amounted to a one-man PR assault through the 1980s. The Justice Department had better things to do than “running down seventy-year-old camp guards,” Buchanan wrote, or “wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime.”

(Emphasis added in most cases.)

Reagan’s last fifteen minutes of shame came out in 2019, when Timothy J. Naftali published a telephone conversation that Governor Reagan had with President Richard Nixon, in which Gov. Reagan ridiculed Africans. (Reagan supported presidential candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960s, and ex-president Nixon would return the favor in the 1980s.) A less well known example was when Gov. Reagan dismissed three Jewish chaplains, understandingly provoking accusations of antisemitism:

Governor Ronald Reagan’s dismissal of three Jewish chaplains, the entire complement ministering on a full time basis to patients of that faith in California’s 14 mental hospitals, is a “blatant act of anti-Semitism.” That was the statement today of Percy Moore, executive director of Oakland’s anti-poverty program and the president of the California Community Action Program Directors Association, a state-wide organization composed of anti-poverty leaders.

Moore, who is black, said that the elimination of all three Jewish chaplains, effective July 1, while some 33 Catholic and Protestant chaplains are retained for full-time work in the mental hospitals, is “nothing more than a blatant act of anti-Semitism that is right in line with other recent acts of the Governor that discriminate against the poor and the sick, and with special impact of those of the minority groups.”

Rabbi Harry Hyman agreed. Of course, given Reagan’s tokenization of Jews, and more importantly, his support for the occupation of Palestine, too many people were willing to forgive or forget this episode. Nevertheless, Reagan’s support was not for Jews in general, but Herzlians like the Hebrew fascist Zeʻev Vladimir Jabotinsky, whom he admired:

“Few are the leaders who in their own lifetime have become a legend. Zeʻev Vladimir Jabotinsky to whom you pay tribute was such a leader. He was a soldier, statesman and poet who believed in the sanctity of the individual. He was a visionary who dreamt of a free Israel in its historic homeland, a society based on justice and the spirit of the ancient prophets. I extend to you may very best wishes for the success of this historic event.”

Needless to say, this topic merely exposes Ronald Reagan’s associations with fascists and neofascists. A definitive iconoclasm would take hours to read, even though it would help explain why neofascists like the Daily Stormer admire Reagan, as did fascists like Léon Degrelle, who wrote in 1992 that

Enrichment follows investment, not the other way around. Since Hitler, only Ronald Reagan has seemed to understand this. As President, he realized that to restore prosperity in the United States meant boldly stimulating the economy with credits and a drastic reduction in taxes, instead of waiting for the country to emerge from economic stagnation on its own.

‘Prosperity’ indeed. Between further impoverishing the lower classes, wasting money on anticommunist terrorism, embracing apartheid, neglecting the AIDS crisis by demonizing homosexuals, and impoverishing scores of millions of Easterners, it is easy to understand why antisocialists consecrate this white supremacist.

Quoting Gabriella Romano’s The Pathologisation of Homosexuality in Fascist Italy: The Case of ‘G’, page 29:

Virility, [George L.] Mosse argued, became a national symbol during the régime, embodied by the dictator’s himself, his physique, his behaviour and way of addressing the crowds, his gestures; dandyism, weakness, effeminacy were perceived as anything that stood in the way, anything that was anti-Mussolini and his ideology.

Furthermore, as the régime concentrated on demographic campaigns, homosexuality came to be perceived as sterile and therefore essentially anti-fascist and selfish, against what was good for the nation. The New Italian Man’s actions were to be inspired by his love for the country: private life was considered a responsible act towards the nation, sexuality had to be aimed at procreation.

I was prompted to ask this question by listening to Season 3 of the Blowback podcast (fantastic podcast btw, I can’t believe I started listening to it until now), which is focused on the Korean War. One thing that stuck out to me was how reluctant Stalin was to give the DPRK Soviet support; he was possibly even willing to let the American occupiers be neighbors with the USSR if it meant he didn’t have to fight the US. He seemed to genuinely think he could engage in compromise with America.

This Western-friendly behavior from Stalin’s government wasn’t particularly new either. Prior to WWII, he reached out to the Brits/French/US to form a pact against Hitler, was rejected, and of course the Munich agreement followed and the Soviets settled with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

It is said Stalin greatly admired Roosevelt, and apparently even Churchill. After WWII, he and the US were able to agree on Austria being a neutral state, and Stalin really wanted a similarly neutral, unified Germany as well (this of course, the US would reject).

So that’s Stalin—genuinely seemed to think the West would act in good faith, but continuously got burned.

Fast-forward to the ‘90s, when much of the Russian/Soviet populace (especially Gorbachev) thought they too would get a liberalized, social-democracy with strong welfare and cheap commodities like Western Europe. Instead, Western financiers gutted their country and basically started the apocalypse until Putin comes along and stabilizes things.

But then Putin asks Bill Clinton if they can join NATO, gets burned again. Even several years ago, the Russians seemed to think the West would uphold their end of the Minsk 2 agreement, and now we have Merkel on tape saying that was never going to be the case. Only with the invasion of Ukraine does it seem like Russia has finally gotten the memo that the West will never act towards them in good faith (and even then, I’m not sure if that sentiment is resolute).

Compare this with other independent non-Western nations, such as China, the DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, Burkina Faso under Traoré, etc. These nations exist on a spectrum, with the DPRK or Yemen being openly hostile towards NATO while China is eager to do business (but doesn’t seem to be under any illusion that it will get to join The Big Club).

So TLDR: it seems to me the Soviets/Russians have constantly engaged with the West in good faith, but always get burned. This stands in contrast to other independent countries which have always seemed much more cynical. Is it due to their relative proximity to whiteness? A lack of direct colonization? Why have the Russians constantly thought they would ever be considered equal partners with the West?

It's really hard to find non Western sources about the Berlin Wall

(This story takes approximately ten minutes to read. Aside from the subjects of misogyny and white supremacy, it also mentions domestic abuse and menstruation, which a few readers may find too discomforting to read.)

Margot Liu née Holzmann had a talent for survival. A Jewish lesbian living in Berlin, she had endured [Fascism] in the 1930s. Yet, in September 1941 she found herself compelled to wear the Star of David. Rather than submit to its indignity and to the prospect of deportation to a concentration camp and eventual extermination, Margot found a way out.

At a birthday party that month hosted by her landlady Frau A., she met Chi Lang Liu, a Chinese waiter who had moved to [the Weimar Republic] in 1932. Margot knew that marrying this man would provide her with Chinese citizenship, thus shielding her from the [Third Reich’s] genocidal laws.⁶⁶

As her girlfriend Martha Halusa averred after the war, in an application to the committee on the ‘Victims of Fascism’ with the Berlin Magistrate, ‘my girlfriend (Freundin) Frau Liu married a Chinese man to save herself from evacuation.’⁶⁷

On 11 October, while celebrating Chi’s birthday, he and Margot had sex for the first time, at which point they decided to become engaged. Eight days later, Chi would claim, ‘Holzmann told me that she had not had her period and that I had to marry her then and there.’⁶⁸

When questioned about the episode some months later, Margot would swear to the police that her periods were highly irregular due to an unspecified ‘affliction of the womb (Unterleibsleiden).’ Unsure if her period was simply late or if Chi had indeed impregnated her, Margot averred, ‘I told Chi that I had not yet had my period without any specific purpose, whereupon he told his entire circle of friends, that I was bearing a little Chinese.’⁶⁹

She was not, as it turned out, pregnant. Margot married Chi on 13 November, securing Chinese citizenship. She was thereby ‘released from wearing the Star of David and protected from evacuation,’ as the Kripo would compulsively mention in their reports on the relationship months later.⁷⁰

Chi claimed that he slept alone on their wedding night, abandoned by his new bride for Martha’s bed in her apartment in the house of the S. family. When he arrived at Martha’s apartment two days later to see Margot, she finally allowed him to spend the night in the bed she shared with Martha. Only in December did Margot and Chi move together into a furnished room let by a Frau Kr. Martha took a room in the same building soon thereafter.⁷¹

Martha had met Margot 12 years earlier when they danced together at the Hamburg cabaret Alkazar. As Margot had lost friends and family to the inexorable progress of [Fascist] antisemitism — her mother died and her father ‘was evacuated,’ that is, sent to a concentration camp and likely exterminated — she relied on Martha more and more.

She would protest to the police investigating her for lesbianism, ‘it is understandable that I would confide in Halusa, who[m] I have been friends with for so long, and draw closer to her.’⁷² In Martha’s postwar application, in which she calls Margot her ‘partner’ and her ‘girlfriend,’ we have surer proof that they were indeed in a romantic relationship.⁷³ But while under interrogation by the Kripo, each woman did their best to deny lesbian proclivities.

Chi eventually noticed that Margot was carrying on an affair with Martha — ‘it became clear to me then that Halusa and my wife practiced lesbian love.’ This in turn had led to numerous arguments and fights between him and his wife. Margot eventually disappeared on 15 May 1942, whereupon Chi again moved and later filed for divorce.

That fall, the criminal police Streife West — not the KJ.M.II.2 division to which M. belonged — received an anonymous tip.⁷⁴ It is entirely likely [that] Chi himself sent it; Martha claimed after the war that Chi ‘denounced us several times.’⁷⁵ The tip claimed that Margot and Martha were lesbians and also engaged in [sex work].⁷⁶

The charge is not an unusual one, for, as noted above, lesbian women often engaged in [sex work].⁷⁷ Moreover, though [sex work] was not technically illegal, [sex workers] faced increasingly draconian regulations and persecution as the war progressed.⁷⁸

The tip prompted a detective K. to open an investigation and to invite Chi to provide information regarding his relationship with Margot. So perturbing did he evidently find Chi’s story, that three days later he visited Margot’s new residence in the apartment of a Frau St.

To his consternation, Frau St.’s 12-year-old daughter answered the door. He questioned her about Margot, and the girl affirmed that although she technically slept on the sofa of her mother’s apartment, Margot frequently bedded with Martha in a separate room. K.’s report concluded:

Through marriage the full-blooded Jewess Liu has now become a Chinese citizen. Both [she and Martha] practice lesbian love and the public is shocked, that lesbian love would be entertained between an Aryan and a Jewess, moreover there are children in the household who are thereby morally endangered.⁷⁹

It is curious that the race of each party constituted such a strong point of interest. While the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had banned marriage and sex between Aryans and Jews out of the deep-seated [Fascist] fear of miscegenation, there was no danger of ‘mixed-race’ children resulting from Margot and Martha’s fornication.⁸⁰ Of course, the inspector could have believed [that] Martha and Margot had violated the laws that forbade Jews from socializing with Aryans; in either event, the report referred to no statute.

More important, the passage makes clear that Margot and Martha’s alleged crimes consisted not so much in loving each other, as in causing a public disturbance and exposing children to what K. considered morally deleterious behavior. What his report counter-intuitively brings to light, however, is that none of the individuals either women came into contact with seemed the slightest bit distraught by their alleged lesbianism.

The detective noted no perturbation on the part of Frau St.’s daughter, nor from the landlady herself (it seems [that] he did not even speak to her). That is, despite claiming ‘the public is shocked’ by Margot and Martha’s behavior, K. did not take down a single expression of surprise, anger, or shock in his report. This is peculiar, particularly because he would soon thereafter forward the account to division KJ.M.II.2, where it would be used as evidence to build a case against Margot and Martha.

Even stranger, no report in the entire file from either division notes the slightest irritation or amazement on the part of any of the numerous landladies with whom the pair lived during the months encompassed in the file. Nor were any of them asked to give evidence.

The next day, inspector K. transferred the file to M. at KJ.M.II.2 ‘for jurisdictional reasons.’⁸¹ Several weeks thereafter, on 15 October, M. brought in Margot and Martha. The two women had a very different story to tell. Margot contested having ever been in a same-sex relationship with Martha, asserting instead, ‘before the promulgation of the Nürnberg laws [of 1935], I was intimately friendly with the German-blooded Hans S. for six years.’

Moreover, she characterized Chi as a Janus-faced ruffian, telling the police that, ‘before the marriage, my husband had only shown himself in the best light. On the day of our marriage my husband was as though changed. He treated me like his maid and hit me numerous times thereafter.’⁸² Chi apparently told her, in the presence of their landlady, that he would connive to put her in jail. He further threatened that if this did not work, he would stab her to death.⁸³

At this stage, Margot’s statement took a bizarre turn. Though unsuccessful in convincing the police of her heterosexuality, she had effectively denied the allegation of prostitution, proving to the inspector that she had recently found employment.⁸⁴

The police left the question of whether she had previously prostituted herself unanswered. But Margot used the question of employment to attack her husband, underscoring that he only appeared to work.

While she had kept the household together by selling over 2000 Reichsmark (RM) worth of clothing, her husband called in sick from work and frittered his time and savings away gambling.⁸⁵ When they first married, he had described his predilection to her ‘as a harmless social game. It has to do with playing ‘Ma Jong’ and various other games of chance.’⁸⁶

Shortly before Easter 1943, however, Chi disappeared. He called Margot three days later, demanding that she bring him something to eat on Dresdener Straße. She described the scene that confronted her thus:

I saw around thirty people at the table and standing around the playing table. Massive sums of money lay on the table. When I entered, everyone became agitated and my husband sprang up from the playing table, and shoved me through the door.⁸⁷

Margot had caught the barest glimpse of a gambling ring. She later reported to M. that, according to Chi’s friends, he had won around 15,000 RM at these games, which brought Chinese men ‘from all cities in Germany and also from Vienna, who had come to Berlin only for the purpose of the game.’⁸⁸

If Margot is to be believed — and it is possible that she simply possessed an overactive imagination — then dozens of Chinese citizens traveled from all corners of the Reich to take part in an underground racket. This is doubly curious as Germany’s 1939 census showed a mere 1,138 Chinese living in the Greater Reich. After the onset of hostilities between China and [the Third Reich] on 9 December, 1941, the régime began interning some Chinese citizens in concentration camps and deporting others.⁸⁹

When Martha came to the police station, she gave a short statement in support of Margot. She contested at the outset, ‘I am normally sexually inclined and have never had intimate relations with Margot.’ While Martha did admit to practicing [sex work], she insisted [that] she regularly visited a doctor to check for venereal diseases, a routine practice in [the German Reich] for regulating and monitoring [sex workers].⁹⁰

At the end of her statement she made a ham-handed attempt to discredit Chi, indicating that he had called Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of independent China, his Führer and that ‘he said, that Chiang Kai-shek is good and [that] Hitler is bad.’⁹¹

For Margot, the investigation seems to have turned out well on balance. On one hand, M. did not believe either woman’s avowals of heterosexuality. He noted in particular, ‘that the prostitutes in Berlin’s West say of Halusa and Liu that they entertain an intimate relationship.’⁹²

He further indicated — just as in the cases above — because Margot and Martha ‘were not previously registered as lesbians with us (sind als Lesbierinnen hier karteimäßig bisher nicht bekannt geworden),’ that ‘registration cards have been provided for (Karteikarten wurden angelegt).’⁹³ Again, the purpose and significance of the registration remains unclear.

M.’s report mentioned that Chi’s lawyer had promised [that] Margot would keep her Chinese citizenship if she assumed fault for the marriage’s dissolution. While he referred Chi’s case of gambling to the state police for further investigation, the shield of foreign citizenship apparently continued to protect Margot.⁹⁴

Given that the government had begun taking Chinese into custody after China declared war, it is frankly bizarre that the criminal police would insist, in multiple documents, on the protections conferred a German Jewish lesbian by virtue of her de jure Chinese citizenship.

Not only did the police detectives persistently insist that Margot’s Chinese citizenship safeguarded her from deportation to a concentration camp, they also demonstrated remarkably little interest in finding a way around this seemingly legalistic hurdle.

As in each of the cases above, M. sent the case file to the state’s attorney at the district court in Berlin. There is no record, however, of what, if any, conclusion [that] the state’s attorney or court reached on the matter, and here the criminal police record drops off.⁹⁵

But Martha’s 1945 application provides a sketch of what happened to the couple. Of the denunciations by Chi she claimed that the two of them escaped unscathed, ‘because we made his behavior out to be an act of revenge.’⁹⁶ She indicated that they began printing anti-fascist flyers in 1943 and that they stayed hidden for the rest of the war, living on Swinemünder Straße.⁹⁷

Walking her dog one evening, Martha claimed [that] she ran into the owner of a nearby store and her boyfriend. In February 1945, this pair invited Martha and Margot, who[m] they knew were a couple, to a birthday celebration, where ‘anti-Nazi conversations took place.’⁹⁸

Unfortunately, they were Gestapo agents and the party was a trap. Margot and Martha were arrested and taken to the SS prison on Oranienburgerstraße. If they had escaped the Kripo without much trouble, their interrogations at the hands of the Gestapo were heinous:

The questioning was terrible; but my girlfriend Frau Liu had it the hardest, because she was dealt with in the most inhuman way not only for political reasons, but also because she is a Jew. After one interrogation she was so battered that I could hardly recognize her. The Gestapo inspector Heinz let out his entire rage on my girlfriend. The Gestapo bureaucrats told us that we were candidates for execution (Todeskandidaten).⁹⁹

Martha was charged with treason and other political crimes. With Margot she was transferred to a Gestapo prison. In April, as the [Soviets] advanced on Berlin and the régime was frantically destroying files, the couple was summoned to a hearing. The soldier escorting them ‘whispered, be brave, the Russians are in Bernau, files are all destroyed, lie to get yourselves out of here (lügt euch raus).’¹⁰⁰

That is precisely what they did. Martha and Margot told the Gestapo official that they were in prison merely for having made statements against the régime while intoxicated. Margot remained mute about her Jewishness. They were instructed to take themselves to the Oranienburgerstraße Gestapo offices, which they did not do. As soon as Margot and Martha were set free, ‘we hid ourselves for four more days until the Russians came. Then finally we were saved and the Hitler-régime was destroyed.’¹⁰¹

I wonder how that shit plays out.

tooze is arguing with someone (?), that holocaust was not perfected death machine where money is not an issue and full strength of state is absorbed by it, but rather the opposite - afterthought in monetary sense for nazi germany, functional for its purpose and no more.

Over the course of three years the fascist colonial authorities in the […] colony of Cyrenaica emptied an entire region of its people in an effort to quell an anti-colonial rebellion and prepare the colony for settlement and incorporation into Mussolini’s envisioned Fascist empire. In this short time span, fascist authorities forcibly deported the semi-nomadic peoples of Cyrenaica from their homeland in the Jebel region and interned them in concentration camps on the desert coast.

These policies resulted in the deaths of more than half of the semi-nomadic population of Cyrenaica, the decimation of their herds, and the near elimination of their way of life. [Fascist] Italy proudly broadcast this episode of colonial conquest to its fellow Western imperial powers who watched a genocide unfold with relative disinterest.

This international neglect provided Fascist Italy with the opportunity to pursue its genocidal policies with minimal consequences or scrutiny, strengthen its geopolitical position in colonial Africa, and elaborate an increasingly radical, violent, and self-assured ideology for […] Fascist colonialism.

[…]

Over a period of four short years the Fascist colonial government forcibly deported an estimated 100,000 “semi-nomadic” people from the colony’s interior and held them in a string of 16 concentration camps on the Mediterranean Coast.

From 1929 to 1934 Cyrenaica’s estimated population dropped from 225,000 to 142,000, indicating that 83,000 people disappeared from the colony in only five years. Of the 83,000 missing, about 60,000–70,000 are believed to have died as a result of the policies of deportation and internment.²

[…]

With the rebellion in Tripolitania crushed and the Benghazi parliament formally suppressed, the fascist regime was free to use whatever means necessary to “pacify” Cyrenaica. The “pacification” of Cyrenaica was by no means the first time that the Italian government employed novel weapons and tactics against its colonial subjects.

The initial invasion of Libya in 1911 saw the first use of aeronautical anti-civilian tactics. The [Regia Aeronautica] would swoop low over Libyan villages and hand-drop explosives on military targets in order to terrorize the civilian population.²³

The Fascists utilized airplanes in Libya again in 1926 when [Fascist] Italy became the first country to intentionally use poisonous gas against civilian populations by dropping canisters of phosgene gas on caravans in the Libyan interior.²⁴

By the end of the 1920s the military situation in Cyrenaica had become untenable for the [Fascists]. Omar al-Mukhtar’s highly mobile guerrilla bands known as duar were able to attack [Fascist] military positions and then quickly disappear back into civilian society making them nearly impossible for a formal army to suppress.

The Governor of Cyrenaica from 1926 to 1929, Attilio Terruzzi, bemoaned that even armies of 5,000 or 10,000 men were insufficient against even a few hundred guerilla fighters who, owing to their semi-nomadic lifestyle, weren’t tied to any specific location and seemed to be able to appear and disappear spontaneously across hundreds of kilometers.²⁵ Terruzzi’s strategy was to use brute force and technological superiority to combat an enemy with better knowledge of the terrain and integration into the local society.

The term says it all: human zoos.

Strange as it may seem, human beings — largely Indigenous people from across the globe — were recruited to perform in ethnographic displays, also called human zoos, from the mid-19th century to the 1930s, mostly in Europe and the United States.

It's estimated that 60,000 people were trafficked in this global trade — including three documented Aboriginal groups: three Badtjala people from K'gari in south-eastern Queensland in 1882, and eight Bwgcolman or Manbarra-speaking people from Palm and Hinchinbrook Islands in north Queensland in 1883, who were followed by nine of their compatriots in 1894.

There was an appetite to see Indigenous people in their "natural state" and, as popular demand surged, the staging of human zoos grew into more exaggerated displays.

Some featured reconstructions of housing, enclosures and other encampments with domesticated animals tended by familial groups of Indigenous people in "traditional" clothing.

At the peak of these degrading spectacles, entire "villages" were constructed in some of Europe's biggest zoological gardens — including the Tierpark in Hamburg owned by exotic animal trader Carl Hagenbeck, as well as zoos in Dresden, Berlin, and Basel in Switzerland.

The phenomenon is often attributed to Hagenbeck, who, according to the records kept by Dresden Zoo, was the impresario behind the first documented exhibition of Aboriginal people in Germany in 1882 — that of the three people from K'gari.

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another interview, think this time more detailed, with author of "Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade"

this is interesting tidbit:

But also, the Solidarity Center has been implicated in trying to aid the US government’s attempts to overthrow Hugo Chávez in Venezuela as recently as 2014, for example, and it stepped up involvement in the Middle East after George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. So sometimes the Solidarity Center’s priorities have seemed to mirror or follow the US government’s foreign policy priorities. And again, Solidarity Center is not funded or controlled by workers. It’s funded by the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID. Right now, Trump and Elon Musk have been dismembering USAID and also putting a stop on the funds that go through NED.

What I’ve heard recently is that Solidarity Center is laying off lots of its staff, furloughing people — basically all but shutting down and maintaining a skeleton crew in its DC headquarters. So what does this mean for the AFL-CIO? The AFL-CIO has been speaking out against a lot of what Musk has been doing to the federal workforce. But it hasn’t been protesting about how this is affecting the Solidarity Center. The fact that Solidarity Center has to basically shut down because of Musk’s attacks on the federal government shows that the Solidarity Center is an arm of the federal government, more so than of the labor movement.

Archive

In researching Cummings’ life for my book about gun culture and capitalism in Cold War America, I often encountered a rumor: Interarms, the business that Cummings founded in 1954 and built into the world’s largest private arms dealer in just a few short years, began as a front for the Central Intelligence Agency. People interested in the who and why of the JFK assassination might have found the March release underwhelming, but for me, one document seems to offer confirmation of decades of historical hearsay: The CIA created and owned America’s largest gun distributor.

. . .

Summarizing Cummings’ file, the previously released redacted version of the document states that “On 17 August 1954 CUMMINGS became the principal agent of the [redacted] International Armaments Corporation and Interarmco.” In the newly released, unredacted version, it reads: “On 17 August 1954 CUMMINGS became the principal agent of the CIA-owned companies known as International Armaments Corporation and Interarmco” (emphasis mine).

In other words, the CIA “owned” the country’s largest importer and distributor of guns, the company that would spearhead a remarkable boom in gun ownership in the United States in the decade and a half before the Gun Control Act iced war-surplus imports.

. . .

Speak about destruction:

Scholars have long written of a phenomenon called “blowback” to describe what happens when the CIA’s international meddling leads to unexpected, and often disastrous, long-term consequences—think of U.S. support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, for instance, eventually giving rise to al-Qaida. What would it mean to add “founded the country’s largest gun distributor” to the Blowback Hall of Fame?

I have occasionally said before that the reason that I study Fascism is to educate other socialists about the subject, but that is only partially true. The other reason is that antisocialists (and sometimes even novice socialists) dish out half‐baked Reich–Soviet analogies so repetitively and tiresomely that it is nearly enough to make me lose whatever sanity that I have left, so I have to read various books and scholarly articles on Fascism to explain why the constant analogies are bullshit. Nicolas Werth—in a rare example of anticommunist honesty—said it best: ‘The more you compare Communism and Nazism, the more the differences are obvious.’

Possibly nothing illustrates this better than the relations between German and Italian Fascism. I have discussed before that Benito Mussolini would be a far more logical analogue to Adolf Schicklgruber than either one of them would be to Joseph Stalin, but relations between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich are of very little interest to presumably “antifascist” anticommunists. Perhaps somebody is afraid that a careful examination of the matter would make the German–Soviet Pact of 1939 look incredibly shallow by comparison? Who knows.

Whatever the case, it would hardly be an exaggeration to describe Mussolini and Schicklgruber as friends. As a matter of fact, they met in person more than any of the Allied leaders did! While there were, of course, bouts of relationship drama, much like in many ordinary friendships, it only took a short while before crybaby time was over and those were all water under the bridge (also like in an ordinary friendship).

Benjamin G. Martin’s The Nazi–Fascist New Order for European Culture, only one of the many books on interfascist relations, sums up the Rome–Berlin Axis in particular nicely. Page 74:

On November 1, 1936, Mussolini announced the birth of the “Rome–Berlin Axis.” This announcement marked the culmination of a process of behind‐the‐scenes negotiations between representatives of Hitler and Mussolini that had begun in the summer of 1935. Both [anticommunists] sought an ally to help them escape their international isolation and to offer cover for their expansionist projects.

The turning point had come in December 1935, when [Rome’s] military campaign in Ethiopia ran into unexpected trouble and Mussolini, hoping to distract and divide the British and French, reached out to Hitler’s Germany in an effort to redraw the balance of forces in Europe. [Rome] abruptly called off [its] earlier diplomatic overtures to the French and the Soviets, and Mussolini let [Berlin] know that he would not object if a formally independent Austria were in reality to become a [Reich] satellite.

German–Italian rapprochement accelerated in the summer of 1936 with the outbreak of Spain’s civil war, as Italian and German intelligence officials coordinated their support for Francisco Franco’s nationalist rebellion against Spain’s democratic republic. For Hitler, peeling [Fascist] Italy away from her ties to France and Britain marked a victory in his effort to undermine unified European opposition to [the Fascist bourgeoisie’s] plans for war and conquest.¹

This arguably marks the point of no return for the two Fascist régimes, if not November 1936 then 22 May 1939, at which point the alliance became de jure. If we mark mid‐ or late 1936 as the start of a de facto alliance (a perfectly valid interpretation, given the Reich and Fascist Italian collaboration in the Spanish Civil War), then we can say that the Third Reich and the Italian Fascists were effectively allied for 8 years.

For how many years was the German–Soviet Pact effective? 1.8. 1.8 years. Yes, under certain criteria somebody can argue that the alliance between the Third Reich and Fascist Italy lasted for fewer than eight years, but even if you apply the most absurdly strict criteria it still outlasted the German–Soviet Pact. Yet which one do you find “antifascist” anticommunists discussing more? Which one do you think is more important to them?

The following are only a few examples of official Fascist propaganda and photographs demonstrating the close ties between German and Italian Fascism, close ties that horseshoe theorists almost always have to scribble themselves for their lazy comparisons. Since I cannot possibly provide every example without testing your patience, I’ll limit myself to twenty items:

Parade of Wehrmacht divisions under the Brandenburg Gate decorated with Fascist flags on the occasion of a speech by Schicklgruber and Mussolini at the Olympic Stadium. Dated 28th September 1937.

Italians showing their support for the Third Reich during Adolf Schicklgruber’s visit to Fascist Italy in 1938.

German press photograph of Benito Mussolini receiving a big send‐off in Berlin. Probably from the 1940s.

Members of a Fascist youth organization talking to members of the HJ on the ‘day of fascist youth’ in Padua, 1940.

Adolf Schicklgruber, Hermann Göring, Benito Mussolini, and Galeazzo Ciano.

Another combination of the fasces and the swastika, this time in the form of a solidarity pin. Probably from the mid‐1940s.

A medal that high‐ranking officials presented to Fascist cannon fodder for their action in North Africa.

Photograph of a mass meeting between the Western Axis powers.

Fascist standards at a maneuver, 1937.

Fascist flags fly side‐by‐side in Rome. Dated 1937

A German post stamp featuring Schicklgruber and Mussolini, between a fasces and a German eagle perched on a swastika. It is captioned, ‘Two peoples and one struggle.’

A Spanish postcard featuring Adolf Schicklgruber, Francisco Franco, and Benito Mussolini.

More fascist artwork featuring Schicklgruber, Franco, and Mussolini. It reads, ‘The three great defensive military leaders of peace and civilisation.’

The big three again. Dated 1938.

Neapolitan anticommunists welcoming Adolf Schicklgruber’s visit to Fascist Italy in May 1938.

French propaganda depicting fourteen European flags, among them Fascist Italy’s and the Third Reich’s, against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Operation Barbarossa inspired a great deal of Axis artwork such as this.

Croatian propaganda depicting seven European flags, among them Fascist Italy’s and the Third Reich’s, heading to Victory.

‘Cheerful comrades in arms outside Tobruk in May 1941. ‘German and Italian soldiers’, Leutnant Wilfried Armbruster penned in his diary, ‘just light up when Rommel comes.’ Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring wrote that the ‘comradeship existing between Italian and German troops can be classified as good, even though at times honest embitterment at the attitude of Italian command and troops clouded the existing friendship.’ According to Rainer Kriebel, ‘It must be stressed that during the fighting around Tobruk not only German, but Italian troops as well, fought with great courage and persistence.’’ (Source.)

Fascist cannon fodder in Athens. Dated 1941.

Another Fascist propaganda poster. It reads, ‘Two people, one war.’

And keep in mind, this brief selection is just photographs and artworks that I’ve found. Examples in audio include how the PNF’s anthem Giovinezza inspired the German song In dem Kampfe um die Heimat, and how the Third Reich’s anthem Horst Wessel Lied in turn inspired the Italian song È l’ora di marciar, but these are only the aesthetics. We must not overlook how the Italian Fascists tutored their German counterparts (in policing and elsewhat). Quoting from Patrick Bernhard’s Borrowing from Mussolini: Nazi Germany’s Colonial Aspirations in the Shadow of Italian Expansionism:

At an early stage, in fact, Hitler maintained that the Jews were a foreign, non‐European element not only in German but also in Italian society. The triumph of fascism in Italy had been a victory for the Italian Volk, Hitler repeatedly said.⁴⁴ It was in Italy that the struggle for racial ‘supremacy’ had been decided: the Jews had lost the battle ‘in Italy as well’. Not least for this reason, there was ‘not another state like Italy today’ so well‐suited to be Germany’s ally. Based on Hitler’s statements, it is clear that the fated fascist alliance also had a racist ideological foundation, and that it should not be understood — as earlier research has so often suggested — as a purely tactical alliance between two major powers that fundamentally mistrusted each other.⁴⁵

Christian Goeschel’s Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance, page 71:

[Fascist] Italy had become more and more economically dependent on [the Third Reich]. By 1936, 20 per cent of [Fascist] Italy’s exports went to [the Third Reich], a huge increase from the 11 per cent of 1932. German imports, especially coal and other raw materials, to [Fascist] Italy also rose dramatically, from 14 per cent in 1932 to 27 per cent in 1936–8, increasing to 40 per cent in 1940.³⁸ In the wake of the October 1936 announcement of the Four‐Year Plan, [Fascist] Italy began to deploy its workers to the Reich. After negotiations in 1937, more than 30,000 Italian agricultural labourers, most of them jobless at a time of high unemployment in Italy, were sent north.

From their humble beginnings in 1922, to the Four Powers Pact of 1934, the Anti‐Comintern Pact in 1936–7, the German–Italian Cultural Accord of 1938, the Pact of Steel of 1939, the Tripartite Pact in 1940, and their bitter ends in 1945, the German and Italian Fascists—not the Soviets—were useful allies to each other. In the words of Adolf Schicklgruber:

In enumerating these factors, Duce, I should like to begin with what for me, through her people, her system and especially her leader, has always been our foremost friend, and always will remain our foremost friend: Italy!

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

It is no wonder, then, that the German and Italian Fascists fought side‐by‐side in Spain, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Eastern Front!

Consider this my not nearly harsh enough revenge for dullards like Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, Roger Moorhouse, and other antisocialist hacks inflating the hell out of the German–Soviet Pact’s importance while reducing the Rome–Berlin Axis to a footnote—if anything at all, that is. Thanks to them, the ‘European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism’ is a thing whereas nobody remembers names like Galeazzo Ciano, Rodolfo Graziani, Pietro Badoglio, or Mario Roatta, let alone their atrocities in Eurafrica.

Pictured: Joseph Stalin beating an Axis dictator.

Damn this is a good video! It's amazing how clear and cogent materialist history is compared to liberal, idealist history. This video lays out the way the transition to capitalism was disastrous for the peasantry, who resisted proletarianization at every step of the way. It also gives a lot of attention to capitalism's invention of modern gender roles as means of economic warfare against women. It's class conflict all the way down.

I really strongly recommend you take the time to give this a watch, it's good shit.

As the Temperature Dropped: A Cold War Prelude in Poetic Dissent

This is a poetic deep-dive into the final breath of FDR and the quiet ignition of the Cold War. Written like a eulogy, a reckoning, and a cinematic spiral—because that’s how history really felt.

“The country was exhausted—but it wasn’t done.

And then, just past noon on April 12, 1945, the center of it all collapsed.”

This piece traces propaganda, power, fear, and fire—from Warm Springs to the Soviet clapback.

Printable & shareable PDF available because I believe in free education.

Check out my Ko-Fi shop for the full ebook and other works if you’d like to support what I’m doing:

https://ko-fi.com/post/As-The-Temperature-Dropped-The-Prelude-to-the-Col-O5O51F32QL

Subject Index: FDR’s death, Cold War origins, U.S.–Soviet relations, Truman’s presidency, wartime propaganda, the Manhattan Project, American exceptionalism, post-war power shifts, historical erasure, narrative dissent, poetic political commentary.